A mixed message to gays?

The US Catholic Bishops' message to gay Catholics is causing confusion and controversy. This from the LA Times' story today:

Written by Bishop Arthur J. Serratelli of Paterson, N.J., chairman of the bishops' doctrine committee, the document teaches that persons with "a homosexual inclination" must be accepted with respect, compassion and sensitivity, and it condemns violence, scorn and hatred.

It also underlines the faith's teaching that although homosexual leanings are not necessarily "rejected by God or the church," engaging in homosexual activity is inherently sinful and contrary to the divine plan.

Specifically, the guidelines encourage homosexuals to take a more active role in church activities, but urges them to remain celibate and not tell anyone other than close friends and family about their sexual orientation.

I'm not sure what to make of the advice to remain semi-closeted, but as for the rest of it, I'm not sure what else the bishops could have said and remained faithful to authoritative Catholic teaching. The Catholic Church will never teach that homosexuality is morally good or neutral because to do so would be to overturn Catholic teaching from time immemorial. They have gone as far as they can in being compassionate and welcoming, but Catholic (and traditional Christian) anthropology really does posit mankind itself as disordered, as the result of the fall, and the condition of homosexual desire as intrinsically disordered; i.e., it is itself impossible to harmonize with Christian teaching.

Catholicism teaches -- as virtually all Christian churches did, until virtually yesterday -- that the only rightly ordered expression of sexuality is between men and women, within marriage. This is true for everyone. When I became a Catholic, I was a young unmarried adult. I believed I had to live chastely, until I married. It was really difficult to live this out, especially because I had no way of knowing if I would ever marry. Two friends of mine walking this same path were gay Catholics; all of us were converts, and all of us accepted that the Church was a divine institution, and our role was to conform our own lives around her authoritative teachings because they were true. It was really, really difficult to do in the area of sexuality, especially because we live in a culture that not only defines one's sexual orientation as intrinsic to, even determinative of, one's core identity. To deny yourself the exercise of sexual expression is, to our culture, to deny your identity. But that's what it means to take up your cross.

I was fortunate, though, because I eventually married. The two friends I mentioned are still living chastely, as I would be if I were not married. Of course barring a change of orientation, they couldn't marry, and so they likely never will have the opportunity to lay down the cross that I left at the altar. They are heroic in my eyes. Every day, they die to themselves for the sake of Christ. (I, too, as a married man, have to die to myself to be faithful to my calling, but in a different way, obviously). Still, even though I'm no longer a Catholic, we all three share the same conviction about the proper relation of humankind to truth in matters of faith and morals: it exists objectively, and we are to submit to it; we don't have the right to expect the Church to remake the sacred deposit of the faith to fit our own desires.

What this issue comes down to, ultimately, is not gay vs. straight, but a couple of simple questions: What is truth? What is the nature of moral authority? As James Davison Hunter identified over a decade ago -- and as TMatt discusses here -- those questions are the cause of the culture wars. That's what the culture war is about. Catholicism has an answer to that question, and has had the same answer since the beginning. It will not change. It cannot change, or it is no longer Catholicism, but a form of liturgical Protestantism. Those who expect it to change labor in vain, and are doomed to disappointment.

All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. True. That is why we are called to be merciful. But it is one thing to be merciful to a sinner, and it is quite another to deny the sin. The Church must do the former; it cannot do the latter. This is an answer that will send many away bitterly, but to say anything other than what the bishops said does no service to the truth, and therefore no service to the people of God.